WTS Announcing P99market.com

[Triiz]

Originally Posted by Octavian [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

In short, while I like your idea to help fight price gouging, I'm not sure this approach is practical for that purpose and actually may negatively impact its ability to showcase true item values after the next, albeit final, patch.

Fair point but items that will be impacted by the next patch/already stuff like CoS make up a pretty slim percentage of overall items being sold. Maybe certain items could be excluded if possible.

I agree listing WTB's is a good idea. One of the things I really liked about P99 Auctions was the "raw auction data" tab where you could see how people actually auctioned things, like if they had an auction that said "Selling this 10k item for 5k for the next 10 minutes." Not something that's really common but it was still handy and I always checked that tab when looking items up.

But like I said, I have no idea how much time this shit takes.

[Octavian]

Originally Posted by Triiz [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Fair point but items that will be impacted by the next patch/already stuff like CoS make up a pretty slim percentage of overall items being sold. Maybe certain items could be excluded if possible.

True, especially since the next patch is the final time that is going to change. The CoS, however had nothing changed about it. It simply stopped dropping, which raised the price from 2k to 10-13k. Then, due to hording/gouging, it randomly more than doubled in the gougers auctions.

On the subject of the CoS, this item showcases another weakness of the P99 wiki; the "Circlet of Shadows" is often confused with the "Circlet of Shadow," leading the wiki for the pre-nerf to include listing of 200-300pp for the post-nerf version, which obviously messes up the average. There ought to be a system of flagging incorrect listings, including the ones where someone auctions an item for "1" instead of "1k" and then you have a 1pp listing majorly dragging the average down. Flagging inappropriate listings for removal may be the best way to keep that in check. This flagging system could also be a method where the community has the power to remove gouged prices, if enough people flag it as inappropriate. Perhaps that is one method that could help to fight against people who do that sort of thing. Then we could simply remove their listings from the pricing data and the average would still be reasonable.

This sort of thing would work, but would be a pretty massive undertaking requiring active "flagged listing" removal from amin(s) of the site. It's a starting point, but I think it is worth workshopping because gougers are really running rampant these days.

[Chewboy]

To answer some of the other questions:

Where's the data coming from?

I wasn't sure if there would be enough demand for this sort of thing so I opted not to do the actual log uploader as trying to employ folks to use it sounds like a pain in the ass. People already use the one for ahungry and these days I don't play much p99, nor am I in the tunnel enough to use my own logs for data. The data is currently scraped from the ahungry site directly every couple of minutes so p99market is 100% reliant on ahungry not making major updates or blocking the ip of the machine doing the scraping. This is by far the largest pitfall of p99market.

That said, the auction parser that I've built is extremely robust and could easily parse the log data if I had direct access to it. I'd love to see a centralized log service that any p99 auction site could share. Maybe something that just shoves all logs into S3? just an idea.

I figured for now just scraping would be fine. The sad part about this is that while I could build a "live auction tracker" I feel as though it would be hijacking all of ahungry's work and claiming it as my own which I definitely do not want to do. Hopefully you can understand? Maybe if I got the okay from him I could implement a feature like that if he's not too mad that I'm scraping in the first place.

As far as the idea of a reportable system, I'd love to have something like that. I imagine it would require some level of manual intervention on my part as having an automated system probably isn't a safe bet. There are some definite challenges there, but I really like the idea.

I've also considered building a feature which allows a user to input a phone number and get a text the next time an item is being sold in their price range, but not sure if anyone would use that (or how much it would cost me).

Sorry for any typos, I'm mobile.

[Chewboy]

Originally Posted by stiv [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Some suggestions. I would make the search box opaque once an item has been queried. Though the background image is sexy AF with it showing within the search field it can be kind of hard to read the info.

I went ahead and darkened the item info section a bit and changed the color on the grid lines of the graph so it's hopefully a bit more legible. Let me know if this is better.

Next feature will be the 'quick-glance' most recent auctions.

[Octavian]

Originally Posted by Chewboy

As far as the idea of a reportable system, I'd love to have something like that. I imagine it would require some level of manual intervention on my part as having an automated system probably isn't a safe bet. There are some definite challenges there, but I really like the idea.

If you're able to work up some type of petition-type system where admins can view a list of flagged posts, gather a few volunteers (like guides), could be feasible. I would happily volunteer some time to helping to deal with the flagged auctions. I'm sure others would as well. Just have to make sure whoever is an admin is a highly reputable player on the server.

Originally Posted by Chewboy

I've also considered building a feature which allows a user to input a phone number and get a text the next time an item is being sold in their price range, but not sure if anyone would use that (or how much it would cost me).

This would be so damn cool. I love that you're thinking of innovating, rather than just pumping out another auction logger. Good on you, man.

[Chewboy]

Originally Posted by Octavian [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I would happily volunteer some time to helping to deal with the flagged auctions. I'm sure others would as well.

Thank you, It'll take some time to develop something like that as I don't have an admin portal or any sort of login/auth system at all at this point. I'll definitely keep you in mind for when/if I end up building something like that.

Originally Posted by Triiz [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Also maybe consider adding the seller names/prices in plain text Wiki-style underneath the charts for quick glances without having to hover over each dot.

Done.

[Chewboy]

bump

[Octavian]

How tough to integrate is a "did you mean..." type of feature in case people misspell something or only know part of the item name?

[Chewboy]

Originally Posted by Octavian [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

How tough to integrate is a "did you mean..." type of feature in case people misspell something or only know part of the item name?

I can give it a shot. Search is usually one of the more difficult problems to solve. Right now the search is my own home grown algorithm, which prioritizes full matches first followed by partial matches. You can see this in action when you type something like "wedding." It will match items that start with wedding followed by items that contain the word wedding in it. It will also try to match partial words like "iamond" will show you the results for diamond. The autocomplete I'd say it works fairly well, but you are right, nothing happens if you misspell something entirely, i.e. typing in 'rygorr' does not give you results for 'ry`gorr.'

Just now I looked into this a bit further and it looks like one of the features of the database I'm using is text indexing which can be used for search. I can play with that a bit and see if I can work up a 'did you mean?' section. It'd be so cool if you could type in ry`gorr armor without that stupid backtick and have it say "did you mean one of the following?" and have it list out 10 of the ry`gorr results.

[Octavian]

Absolutely, there's so much of that crap in item names. Another cool feature would be a search of "fungi" suggesting "Fungus Covered Scale Tunic," and other such common names. For example, typing "CoS" could bring up Circlet of Shadow," etc. I know the wiki does that for some things. For example, if you type "ToV" on the wiki, Temple of Veeshan comes up. It's probably a matter of compiling a long list of redirects for the most common stuff. CoS, Fungi, CoF, etc... just spitballing since we're talking about an "ideal" kind of site.